Clarissa's Blog

Cue the peaceniks who will now tell China and Russia to stop escalating:

Ha ha, obviously, it’s a joke. China and Russia are always poor innocent victims for our peace-loving anti-escalationists.

The problem with the movie To Leslie is its investment into magical mentality. If you are a raging alcoholic who abandoned your small child because of your addiction, steals from relatives, prostitutes yourself, and ended up in the streets, do you know what you need to do? Just quit! Easy-peasy! Gosh, I wonder why all homeless addicts don’t do it. Maybe nobody told them it’s as easy as that.

If you are a falling-down, slobbering drunk, don’t worry! A good man is bound to fall in love with you and solve all your problems.

If you drank away all your money and became homeless, it’s fine. You’ll be offered a job with room and board. And don’t worry about being too much of a mess to show up to work. The job will still be there waiting for you as you barf your guts out during hangover.

If you are a minimum-wage motel maid, that’s not a big deal. Just save money and open your own business. It will only take a few months to save up to open your own diner.

The smug, clueless entitlement of the people who make such movies really gets to me.

I heard about this movie because the lead actress is apparently getting cancelled for being too white or something. I can’t be bothered to unravel the Byzantine complexities of this particular offense to the inflamed sensibilities of the martyrs to social justice but I went ahead and watched the movie.

To Leslie could have been great. The female star portrays a degraded, miserable alcoholic very well. The first half of the movie is exactly the kind of film I like. We see a messy, often sad, sometimes heartbreaking, occasionally ridiculous life. Everything is real, everything is just like it is. I started feeling hopeful it would actually be a good movie.

But then, of course, the ridiculous Hollywood obsession with massaging everything into an implausible happy ending swept in and turned the movie into a joke. To accommodate the silly contortion of the plot, the actors turn into plastic figurines, and everything falls apart.

The concept of an obligatory happy ending is one of the many gifts given to us by Christianity. I often hope, however, that this would be the gift we sometimes denied. This way we could enjoy something beyond the exact same saccharine story where everything always ends well in the exact same soporific manner.

The movie is a waste of time, in short.

We are trapped in an unhealthy symbiosis of woke overreach and anti-woke reaction. They need each other to exist. They feed each other. They function as a closed system that’s not outwardly oriented. Their interaction can’t generate new ideas, new solutions, or any meaningful action at all.

Woke and anti-woke are in love with each other but the joyful, orgasmic union they keep experiencing is sterile. They are too similar, too closely related to be able to procreate. Their pleasure is masturbatory and as such never quite satisfactory enough.

We know woke and anti-woke by different names. We can call them progressives and MAGAs. Far left and far right. BLM and January 6. Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson. Taylor Lorenz and Douglas Murray. The name doesn’t matter. What matters is that their passionate embrace is choking all life out of our public sphere. Their enthusiastic coupling is so loud, showy and boisterous that we are constantly duped into expecting some progeny to pop out. But there will be none. They’ll keep providing each other with opportunities to scratch the itch of outrage. They’ll keep competing who is the biggest victim in their dysfunctional lovefest. But they’ll never move on from each other.

Klara and her cousin, a boy her age, created a game that feeds both her need to take care of small, helpless creatures and his need to go to battle against ferocious enemies.

In the game, he’s an abandoned baby tiger that she brings home and nurtures. He grows into a huge, strong tiger and rips apart the enemies who threaten her.

Nobody suggested the game to them. They wanted to play, discovered that their needs were very different, and found a way to accommodate both. Adults should learn from kids how to do this elegantly and easily.

Parents create their child’s personality. Willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unawares, but they do it.

Adulthood comes when the impact starts moving in the opposite direction. Adult children (but only those who actually grew) begin to mold their parents.

On the positive side, the pelmeni family from Tuva is making N feel better about his parents.

“At least, my parents wouldn’t accept the pelmeni!” he says happily. “At least, they wouldn’t stoop that far! I’m sure they wouldn’t!”

His joyful face at discovering a family more screwed up than his is painful to see. I’m not entirely convinced his parents wouldn’t accept the pelmeni but I’m glad he’s happy so I’m not saying anything.

MEMBERS OF THE American Friends Service Committee, a prominent Quaker organization known for its progressive values and social justice advocacy in the U.S. and abroad, have raised an alarm about a woman holding a leadership position within the organization who they say has misrepresented her ethnic background for years and who they fear may be working on behalf of groups seeking to undermine their organization. Raquel Evita Saraswati, a Muslim activist who for years has encouraged people to believe that she is a woman of color, including Latina as well as of South Asian and Arab descent, is the AFSC’s chief equity, inclusion, and culture officer, a senior position that gives her access to the files of dozens of the organization’s staff and volunteers. But Saraswati, who was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel, is not a person of color, according to her mother, Carol Perone.

https://theintercept.com/2023/02/16/american-friends-service-committee-raquel-saraswati/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

If you care about “ethnic backgrounds” of people who work for you, this will always be the result. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, as they say.

Oskar Pierre Castro, a human resources professional who participated in the search committee to fill Sarawati’s position, told The Intercept that she had presented herself as a “queer, Muslim, multiethnic woman.” “It really touched all the points,” said Castro, who works for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a Quaker group that frequently partners with the AFSC, and who was involved in the search along with AFSC staff members.

Who talks like this about people? The woman is being described like an object for sale. Yippee, she met the list of specifications. Look how this HR guy speaks about a job candidate:

Castro added, “In my mind it was, ‘Great, a person of color, a queer person of color, who happens to be a Muslim, it’s a woman, all these things, and someone who seemed to get it. I definitely feel conned. … I feel deceived.”

How is it acceptable to reduce human beings to their body parts and sex habits? This is absolutely horrid.

Of course, if you are trying to make a shady purchase, you will end up being conned. I’m completely on this woman’s side. She duped the people who richly deserved to be duped because they despise other humans.

A neurotic is a traumatized person who is directing all of his energy into making others service his neurosis. Mental issues are a powerful mechanism of transforming reality and bending others to your will.

A responsible, adult individual treats his traumas with a professional or through a variety of mental hygiene means that everybody can individually access.

People who expect others to tiptoe around their traumas are manipulators. They aren’t necessarily doing it consciously but that doesn’t change the result.

By playing into this charade and assisting a neurotic in making his trauma somebody else’s problem, we become complicit in this manipulation.

This article was published yesterday:

I mean, you know?

Obviously, no apology is forthcoming from people who called us conspiracy theorists for saying exactly this for two years.

Now let’s wait for the shocking news that masks are useless against a respiratory virus and that mRNAs were a very bad idea.